New IP Steep Announced
Yves Guillemot, the president of Ubisoft proper, went on stage at the Ubisoft E3 press conference to proudly announce that it is throwing its hat into the ring of winter extreme sports while combining it with the publisher’s obsession with the open-world format. The end result is a brand new intellectual property simply dubbed Steep. As the announcement suggests, it is an open-world extreme sports game and it came accompanied with a teaser trailer offering a brief look at this fascinating concept. Here the announcement trailer:
It shows off some winter sports that we are all familiar with like skiing and snowboarding, but also throws paragliding and a couple of other cool diversions into the mix. It is a very striking trailer. It would be very nice to see the winter extreme sports genre to make a comeback in a big way. A gameplay demo was shown and has a great rendered depiction of the Swiss Alps with the player paragliding and landing on a top of a large rock face overlooking a lovely snowing mountainous landscape. This title is introducing a Drop Zones feature that allows for easy access to subsections of the mountains. The player is supposed to be able to take part in all sorts of winter extreme sports based challenges dynamically within this open-ended environment.Here is the full gameplay reveal:
Ubisoft has taken some graphical techniques from The Division and has expounded upon them in Steep. The winter weather effects are possibly volumetric, as it looks very organic. The way the powdered and wet snow buckles under the weight of the character’s boots is a great touch that a game like this absolutely has to nail in terms of visuals. It looks impressive so far and it will be neat to see what other environments will be available in this new IP. Steep is currently set to release sometime during December 2016.
